PRAISE FOR BOYS WILL BE BOYS
‘A damning look at toxic masculinity. It’s the most important thing you’ll read this year.’ Elle Australia
‘Boys Will Be Boys is a timely contribution to feminist literature. Her central point is clear and confronting, and it represents something of a challenge… Ferocious, incisive, an effective treatise.’ Australian Book Review
‘A piercing gaze at contemporary patriarchy, gendered oppression and toxic masculinity.’ Sydney Morning Herald
‘A truly vital piece of social commentary from Australia’s fiercest feminist, Boys Will Be Boys should be shoved into the hands of every person you know. Clementine Ford has done her research—despite what her angry detractors would have you believe—and spits truths about toxic masculinity and the dangers of the patriarchy with passion and a wonderfully wry sense of humour. Read it, learn from it, and share it—this book is absolute GOLD!’ AU Review, 16 Best Books of 2018
‘Boys Will Be Boys is an impassioned call for societal change from a writer who has become a stand-out voice of her generation (and has the trolls to prove it) and an act of devotion from a mother to her son.’ Readings
‘With pithy jokes and witty commentary, this is an engrossing read, and Ford’s spirited tone evokes passion for change.’ Foreword Reviews
‘Clementine Ford reveals the fragility behind “toxic masculinity” in Boys Will Be Boys.’ The Conversation
‘Boys Will Be Boys highlights the need to refocus on how we’re raising our boys to be better men. The ingrained toxic masculinity within society does just as much damage to our boys as it does to our girls, and this book highlights how to change that.’ Fernwood Magazine
PRAISE FOR FIGHT LIKE A GIRL
‘Her brilliant book could light a fire with its fury. It gets my synapses crackling and popping; I find I can’t sit down while reading it, so instead I pace the sitting room.’ Sunday Times
‘There’s a wonderful book by Clementine Ford that I advise every woman, and especially young women, to read called Fight Like a Girl.’ Kate Beckinsale
‘It’s the wit and searing honesty of her own personal life laid bare where Fight Like a Girl truly shines.’ Irish Independent
‘Changed my life. I have never read a book like this.’ Pandora Sykes
‘Clementine Ford was put on this earth to give courage to the young girl inside all of us. This is an exciting, essential book from Australia’s most fearless feminist writer.’ Laurie Penny, author of Unspeakable Things
‘Yes, Fight Like A Girl will make you angry. It will make you feel uncomfortable. But, ultimately, it will inspire you to create change.’ Marie Claire
‘Required reading for every young man and woman, a brave manifesto for gender equality, harm minimisation and self-care.’ The Australian
‘Clementine is furious and scathing . . . yet compassionate and encouraging every moment she can be. This book is both a confirmation of sisterhood and a call to arms.’ Bri Lee, author of Eggshell Skull and co-founder of Hot Chicks with Big Brains
‘An intimate, though universal, call to arms . . . Ford’s book is a galvanizing tour de force, begging women to never give up on the most radical act of all: loving themselves wholly and completely in a world that doesn’t love them back.’ Booklist
‘A potent mix of memoir and manifesto, equal parts fierce and friendly; an intimate, witty self-portrait and a rousing call to arms for women everywhere to know their rage, own it, wear it and channel it into fighting for change.’ Sydney Morning Herald
‘Fight Like A Girl is fuelled by Ford’s clear-eyed defiance and refusal to compromise, and by her powerful combination of personal testimony and political polemic. In the vein of Caitlin Moran’s How to be a Woman or Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist.’ Books + Publishing
‘It’s a call to action but, more importantly, it’s a call to reason. A must-read for all women.’ Fashion Journal
‘Brutally honest and unapologetic . . . Ford tackles society’s double standards and contradictions, tackling these head-on like a fearless heroine . . . Fight Like A Girl is a feisty call to arms for modern women . . . Keep on fighting the good fight, Clem, so that one day we may all enter the ring with you.’ The AU Review
‘Clementine Ford was one of my very first formative feminist influences, initiating me into the world of feminism. She is someone whose tenacity and fearlessness I admire greatly, and she helped me along the path to becoming the humourless, bitter, lesbian feminist I am today.’ Rebecca Shaw, writer, SBS and WomanAgainstFeminism@NoToFeminism
‘Though casual in tone, Fight Like A Girl is persuasive and confronting . . . you finish the book angry—and rightly so . . . It reminds readers to be angry, because there is a lot to be angry about. It is a launching pad into a world of intersectional reading, and more specific advice on how to rock the status quo.’ Lip Mag
‘Never did I realise I held so much rage against the devaluement of women until reading Fight Like A Girl . . . Confronting, immersive and influential.’ Diva Book Nerd
Clementine Ford is a freelance writer, broadcaster and public speaker based in Naarm/Melbourne.
For my boy
CONTENTS
Author’s note
Introduction
1 It’s a boy
2 A woman’s place
3 Girls on film
4 Not all men
5 We know what boys are like
6 Mass debate
7 The manosphere
8 Your Honour, I object
9 The king of the hill
10 It’s just a joke
11 Asking for it
12 Witch hunt
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Readers should be advised that this book contains detailed references to homophobia, transphobia, men’s violence against women, online abuse and misogynist harassment. There are detailed descriptions of rape and assault. Please go gently if you are likely to be triggered by these things.
There is a much larger discussion to be had about the impact of the gender binary in regard to our understanding of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’. I encourage readers to seek out the work of trans and gender diverse writers with lived experience of this, and to continue to seek out the voices of trans and gender diverse people within feminism and social justice. Please note that this book is largely about the harm wielded by cissexist, heteronormative ideals of masculinity and, as such, much of the broader discussion of ‘men’ in this context is referring to cisgender men who are for the most part white and heterosexual.
A brief note for readers unfamiliar with some of the terms found within:
Transgender: The word applied to people whose assigned sex at birth differs from their gender identity. Please note that gender non-binary trans people may not identify as male or female at all, or as one or the other only some of the time.
Cisgender: The word applied to people whose assigned sex at birth accords with their gender identity. For example, I am a cisgender woman who was assigned female at birth and who identifies as a woman.
Cissexist/Cisnormative: The presumption that cisgender experiences are superior or standard, and the discrimination directed towards trans people and issues because of this.
Heteronormativity: The presumption that heterosexual experiences are superior or standard, and the discrimination directed towards queer people and issues because of this.
Cis-het: Shorthand for someone who is cisgender and heterosexual.
Disabled person (as opposed to person with a disability): I follow the lead of the disability activists I know who subscribe to the social model of disability. The social model dictates that people are disabled not by their b
odies or conditions, but by the reluctance or outright refusal of a broader ableist society to adapt itself to their needs.
This book is not meant to be a definitive guide to toxic masculinity or how feminism responds to it; it would be impossible to cover everything. Trust me, I have had numerous anxiety spirals about this! It’s better to consider this book as just one contribution to a larger conversation. I hope very much this is a conversation that you will keep having not just with me but with your friends, family and community.
In solidarity, Clementine Ford
INTRODUCTION
In 1996’s The Craft (an epic ride of a movie about four teenage witches who join together to form a coven—shit goes down, people get hurt, don’t mess with the gifts you’re given etc.), Manon is the spiritual deity who can be invoked to bestow power on his devotees. In describing Manon to newcomer Sarah, coven leader Nancy (played to gothic perfection by Fairuza Balk) says, ‘If God and the Devil were playing football, Manon would be the stadium that they played on; He would be the sun that shone down on them.’
The fabricated deity of Manon wasn’t intended to represent patriarchy (although you have to question why the spiritual being created as a figure of worship for teenage witches is written as a male figure—something something male scriptwriters, something something don’t understand women), but I’m going to steal the analogy to explore how a system that oppresses everybody by, in part, reinforcing regressive stereotypes of binary gender can be continuously unseen even by those oppressed by it.
Like Nancy’s explanation of Manon to Sarah, the concept of patriarchy is hard to explain. It is especially hard to explain to those people who have either never heard of it or whose only experience of it is in laughing sarcastically at feminists and all our LOL TRIGGERED paranoia. Patriarchy isn’t a visible building that we can walk in and out of. It isn’t a wardrobe of clothing we can run our hands through, whose fabric we can feel and count the fibres of. It’s in the air we breathe, the gravity that keeps us weighted to the earth. It is a language we learn to speak from the moment we’re born, but it has no pattern of speech, no formal sentence structure and no written alphabet.
It’s the stadium that the game of life as we know it is played in, the sun that shines down on it and the grass that carpets the ground.
I knew there was a reason I hated football.
Some people are resistant to discussing patriarchy or its impact, because they understand it, not as a form of structural power that is woven through every facet of our lives, but rather as something hysterical women whinge about in order to make men feel bad. But it isn’t feminism or the challenges it throws down to patriarchy that creates the cultural expectations placed on men that lead to their self-doubt, to their increased levels of poor mental health (and the subsequent refusal to talk about such things) or to the shame many of them feel for ‘failing’ to measure up to the so-called rules of manhood inflicted on them from birth. Although the system of patriarchy is designed to privilege masculinity (with an emphasis on cis-het masculinity), it also demands of men a conformity to rigid constraints that, depending on their ability to move freely within these constraints, carries a degree of harm and oppression.
In her no-holds-barred TED talk on patriarchy and how to dismantle it, Professor Ananya Roy, a scholar in urban planning and global development, says, ‘Patriarchy also defines the identity of men. It is as much the enforced script of proper masculinity—how to be a real man—as it is that of proper femininity.’
Roy’s thinking echoes that of the great feminist and civil rights scholar, bell hooks. In The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity and Love, hooks writes:
The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.
I think of this quote often when trying to wrap my head around the ways in which some boys and men are able not only to cause catastrophic harm to girls and women as individuals, but also to collude with each other to perpetrate pack attacks that range from the mildest forms of sexual harassment (if such a thing can ever really be dismissed as ‘mild’) to the kind of orchestrated, ritualistic gang rapes and assaults that have become more visible now (if not necessarily more common), because of the sickening trend of filming them and sharing them so that even those men who weren’t able to join in physically can at least vicariously consume the humiliation of a woman or women and thus deepen their connection to the Brotherhood of Man.
It needs to be understood that we are not talking about outliers here, or people who are inherently evil. Some of them perhaps are; most of them are just easily led. They may be drunk on the thrill of being part of a pack or too afraid to speak out and risk the pack turning on them. And if our sons and brothers and friends and partners and nephews and cousins and fathers and husbands are all susceptible to a bit of ‘follow the leader’, to ‘getting carried away’, to not speaking up, to laughing along, to putting themselves and their preservation first in a patriarchal system that rewards complicity among men—if they are all at risk of surrendering to weakness and supported to do so by a culture that refuses to understand the gravity of the problem, none of us can ever really be safe.
Two weeks before I sat down to write the introduction to this book, a string of things happened that confirmed to me just how far we had travelled into the fog of toxic masculinity.
The first was the disappearance and presumed murder in early June of a twenty-eight-year-old woman named Qi Yu. Less than a week after she went missing, a nineteen-year-old man—her housemate—was arrested and charged with her murder. At the time of writing, her body had still not been recovered.
That same week, a twenty-two-year-old comedian named Eurydice Dixon was raped and murdered as she walked home after work. Her body was found in the early hours of the morning on the soccer pitch of a popular inner-city Melbourne park, less than 900 metres from her home. A nineteen-year-old man surrendered himself to police a day or so later, after CCTV images of his face had been released to the public. Between the discovery of Eurydice’s body and the arrest of the man charged with her murder, a detective from Victoria Police gave a press conference in which he advised people to practise ‘situational awareness’, as if being hyper aware of our surroundings isn’t something women especially have been practising since childhood.
A makeshift memorial site was established at the place where Eurydice was found, and an evening vigil was planned to remember her. That morning we woke to the news that in the dead of night, someone had desecrated the site with a twenty-five-metre-long cock and balls drawn in sticky white paint. Emergency service workers tried to remove it in time for the vigil, but it proved so resistant to their efforts that, in the end, they had to cover it with a tarpaulin.
Just let that sink in for a moment. A woman was raped, murdered and dumped on a sports field. And in response, someone chose to draw a giant dick pointing at the flowers that had been laid to honour her. The actions of a child, surely? Unfortunately not. The man ultimately arrested and charged was Andy Nolch, a thirty-one-year-old man from within the comedy community who had railed against what he saw as the media’s demonisation of men in the wake of Eurydice’s murder. He later told Fairfax he had done it as ‘an attack on feminism’.
The same week of Qi and Eurydice’s murders, an eleven-year-old girl was abducted in Newcastle and sexually assaulted for several hours by a man in his late forties. When he was finished, he dumped her by a train line and she walked nearly one kilometre to get home. That little girl worked bravely with police to identify her attacker, and a man was arrested less than a week later and charged. When his name and photograph was released to the public, I watched as online comment sections overflowed with astonishment at how
normal he looked—as if feminists haven’t been arguing for all of eternity that predators don’t carry badges that formally identify them as such. Five days after the rape and murder of Eurydice Dixon, a woman was dragged into a car on Lygon Street, a busy strip in Carlton, less than two kilometres from where Eurydice’s body had been found. She was raped and then dumped at her home. A few days later, two men handed themselves in to police. They were cricket teammates.
This was one week of high-profile cases in Australia, and I haven’t even raised the fact that every week approximately two women are murdered in this country by a current or former intimate partner. (Indeed, less than a month after this, three separate women were murdered on the same day. In a terrible case of syncronicity, the same week I made updated changes to this book for its international release, a young Palestinian woman living in Melbourne was also raped and murdered as she made her way home from seeing a comedy show one night. There was no desecration of her memorial, but it came at the same time as a global outrage towards Gillette for daring to use an advertising campaign to address the topic of toxic masculinity.) In the aftermath of all of these gendered homicides, men everywhere fall over themselves to insist that ‘not all men’ are responsible for crimes such as these; that, in fact, most men are good, decent, wonderful people who would never tolerate gendered violence and would always, always, always stand up to intervene when they saw it happen.
The truth is very different. Most men struggle to speak out against sexism and abuse, not necessarily because they’re bad people, but because patriarchy impacts us all and the pressure to conform to it is intense. That doesn’t mean they aren’t very good at pretending. Entire organisations are built on the appeal of rewarding men for just showing up, festooning them with white ribbons and bending over backwards to call them champions, ambassadors, heroes and any other celebratory title you can think of that effectively heralds men for being basically okay humans some of the time. Only a few days ago, I read an article in which a quite famous male parenting ‘expert’ crowed about how wonderful it was that men had now increased the time they spent with their children to up to forty minutes a day! Well, hell, let’s have a fucking parade.
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